The Frick Collection has unveiled a striking site-specific installation by contemporary artist Flora Yukhnovich that reinterprets François Boucher's 1755 masterpiece "The Four Seasons" for the modern era. The four-paneled mural, housed in the museum's Cabinet Gallery, transforms the intimate space with vibrant colors and organic forms that honor the 18th-century original while asserting its relevance in today's globalized world.
When Boucher created his original Four Seasons series in 1755, French agriculture operated on strictly seasonal cycles that had remained unchanged for millennia since humans first began cultivating crops. Good years brought autumn harvests of grapes, apples, and pears, while spring delivered tender greens, asparagus, and peas, and summer provided an abundance of berries, grains, and vegetables. Today's globalized food system, with its reliance on refrigeration, freezing, canning, and other processing technologies, has largely obscured these natural rhythms, making it easier to notice seasonal changes through Starbucks' annual pumpkin spice offerings than by observing actual pumpkins in fields.
Yukhnovich's installation covers the Cabinet Gallery like elaborate wallpaper, carefully accommodating windows, doorframes, and the wood paneling that lines the room's perimeter. A crimson ribbon approximately one inch thick traces the gallery's architectural outlines across the top of the painting, enhancing the work's domestic and decorative sensibility. The four panels represent distinct seasons while maintaining enough visual continuity to create a seamless viewing experience reminiscent of an endless Instagram scroll or looping video reel.
The artist employs a bold palette that extends far beyond traditional earth tones of greens and blues. Her work bursts with fantasy colors including pink, purple, lavender, and turquoise that seem drawn from Disney cartoon universes rather than the natural world. This princess-like color scheme intensifies the small room's atmosphere, creating a synthetic quality that becomes even more pronounced when compared to the Boucher and Fragonard paintings displayed elsewhere in the collection. The overall effect is simultaneously dazzling and vulgar, like consuming an overly sweet pastry to excess.
Within this explosion of color, floral and plant-like shapes unfurl and cascade across bucolic landscapes with vague suggestions of mountainous backgrounds. Yukhnovich favors bold brushwork and energetic movement throughout the mural, decorating thick abstract sections with delicate, sinuous lines. Occasionally, these gestures coalesce into more defined figures, such as a doe and buck visible in the Autumn panel or what appears to be a hare in the Winter section.
Notably absent from Yukhnovich's interpretation are human figures, despite Boucher's original work depicting romantic encounters within each seasonal vignette. This omission raises intriguing questions about the artist's vision. The landscapes might represent a futuristic, post-human era where nature, freed from the excessive consumption of the Anthropocene period, can flourish once again without human interference.
Careful observation reveals subtle details that connect the installation to its physical environment. Faint horizontal lines of white paint appear at regular intervals in the upper portions of the Summer and Fall panels. These whisper-thin marks mirror the wooden muntins that divide the windows on the gallery's east-facing wall, creating an unconfirmed but compelling connection between the fantastical painted world and the actual abundance visible outside the mansion's walls.
The installation demonstrates how contemporary artists can engage with historical masterpieces while addressing current global realities. Yukhnovich's translation of Boucher's work into what might be called a "digital-age fantasia" maintains connections to both the original artwork's themes and the natural world beyond the gallery space, where trees and natural light continue to mark the passage of seasons.
Flora Yukhnovich: The Four Seasons continues at The Frick Collection, located at 1 East 70th Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side, through March 9, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Xavier F. Salomon and represents a significant dialogue between 18th-century French Rococo art and contemporary artistic expression in an era of climate change and technological transformation.
